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[Playstation Lifestyle] New PlayStation Handheld Hopes Alive After PS Portal Success
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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That might work, but I'm not sure all of the tradeoffs would line up there.
At $350-$400 you're competing with the Steam Deck. I think that's asking for failure. Sony might allow Linux on it (like the PS2 and PS3), but I would expect the main gaming OS to be fairly locked down with DRM. The Deck is a couple years old so maybe they could beat them on price/performance/battery life, but not by a huge amount of we are talking about the power to play PS4 games. They would have a miniscule fraction of the library, and probably not the track pads and key software to allow the Deck to play M&KB games.
And then there is the Switch. The regular version is $270, the OLED is $330. Huge install library already. Plus you get the versatility of handheld and home use, plus the JoyCons (which there would be legal hurdles to try to copy). And the Switch 2 is right around the corner. I would bet (and I think Sony would too) that the Switch 2 is going to be a similar price and competitive performance/battery life. I don't think you're proposing would compete.
And you'd still have the problem of splitting the dev base. I could be wrong, but I thought Sony announced they are no longer publishing for the PS4 (the last game would have been Lost Soul, but the PS4 version was canceled so the last game they published was MLB 2023) and expect 3rd parties to end in 2025. Heck, a PS5 Pro has been rumored for a while now. So it seems Sony is trying to get away from PS4 development.
Don't get me wrong- I like your idea. But i think something like that would be a sudden reversal of the direction Sony has been signalling they want to go for a few years now.
They're a console, and the one that's winning comfortably. Steam deck, as well as it's managed to minimize the friction, still has a lot more that Sony just tweaking PS4's OS a little, and it wouldn't have the multiplayer issues Linux does out of the box.
The switch is limited on what games can go on it by the bad CPU, and we haven't seen any real indication that Nvidia is going to be able to do better on the next one.
People are buying just the streaming handheld at a pretty decent rate for $200. Doubling that to play their entire PS4 library and still be able to stream PS5 games is a no brainer. They'd get the volume for all the same reasons PS is popular to begin with.
I don't think they'll do it, but I'll stand by my assertion that it's what the PS Portal should have been. Streaming isn't good enough to justify the price tag, even as premium as the actual device feels. I think most people willing to spend $200 for a dumb streaming handheld would have been willing to double it to natively play a lot of their games. That's not a budget conscious purchases.